Chris Dwan

Tag: doomed

  • Abandoned Nuclear Lighthouses

    clued me in to Warren Ellis’s link to this set of pictures about a series of Soviet era nuclear powered lighthouses, now abandoned near the arctic circle.

    The great northern coast of Russia is inside the Arctic Circle, and the shoreline is hundreds of miles from civilisation almost the whole way along. Lighthouses were required for the coast, because it’s a handy passage but it spends a hundred days of the year in near-permanent night. The problems were that they’d be miles from anywhere, and couldn’t realistically be supplied or crewed.

    So the Russians erected autonomous nuclear-powered lighthouses. Which worked great, until the collapse of the Soviet Union. In fact, they probably would have been fine after that, if people hadn’t looted them for copper and anything else that looked like it wasn’t nailed down too hard. Including, apparently, reactor shielding. So many of these great polar nuclear lighthouses are now radioactive deadzones.

    This is satisfyingly apocalyptic for me. Mmmmmmm.

  • War

    I’ve been disconnected from the net (by choice) for a couple of lovely days with family out in Virginia.

    I return to see that Israel is actually invading and conquering Gaza.

    My first impression, which I’m sure will be moderated by reading the actual article rather than just seeing the headline is that this is somewhat akin to the US invading one of our Indian reservations. With fighter jets and tanks and everything.

  • Lungfish, and sick cows

    Well, I’ve had The Cough for long enough that it needs a name: Its name is now “lungfish.”

    In other news, the biggest meat recall in history is underway. 145 MILLION pounds of beef. That’s 1.45E8 for the geeks in the crowd. At between 500 and 800 pounds of meat (usable) per cow, that’s between 181,000 and 290,000 individual animals. If my high school had been in the business of graduating cows, instead of people, that’s between 300 and 400 graduating classes.

    The recall by the Westland/Hallmark Meat Company, based in Chino, Calif., comes after a widening animal-abuse scandal that started after the Humane Society of the United States distributed an undercover video on Jan. 30 that showed workers kicking sick cows and using forklifts to force them to walk.

    You’ll be happy to know that there is already a term of art for cows too sick to walk, unassisted, into the slaughter chamber. It’s “downer” cows. I would love to believe that this is a subtle play on the fact that it’s a real downer to read about this crap … but I suspect not.

    Cows too sick to walk, who had to be kicked and prodded to the slaughter. Yummy? You like that slightly char-broiled taste?

    Anyway, there’s nothing to worry about:

    “The great majority has probably been consumed,” said Dr. Richard Raymond, the Agriculture Department’s under secretary for food safety.

    Yup. You already ate it. Please return to your regularly scheduled activities.

    It was news almost exactly like this that pushed me into my first flirtation with vegetarianism.

  • AAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

    Jellyfish!

    In many places — the atolls of the Pacific, the shrimp beds of the Eastern Seaboard, the fiords of Norway — some of the most advanced forms of ocean life are struggling to survive while the most primitive are thriving and spreading. Fish, corals and marine mammals are dying while algae, bacteria and jellyfish are growing unchecked. Where this pattern is most pronounced, scientists evoke a scenario of evolution running in reverse, returning to the primeval seas of hundreds of millions of years ago.

    Jeremy B.C. Jackson, a marine ecologist and paleontologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, says we are witnessing “the rise of slime.”

    …

    “We’re pushing the oceans back to the dawn of evolution,” Jackson said, “a half-billion years ago when the oceans were ruled by jellyfish and bacteria.”

    As noted by jwz: It’s Lovecraft via They Live: “they are turning our atmosphere into their atmosphere…”